Mapping Moggies

To coincide with the imminent opening of London Zoo’s new Tiger Territory enclosure for BIG cats, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) have recently launched an on-line Cat Map. The map was launched with the aim of raising awareness about animal conservation but also as a tool to help the ZSL survey the capital’s housecat population.

Within a matter of days, the map has been populated by cat owners from around the globe and, at the time of writing, comprises a record of the age, gender, colour, name and location of over 3,500 feline pets together with their photographs. All these criteria are searchable thereby allowing the user to search for all black and white cats called Jess, for example.

It would appear that my nearest recorded cat is currently a 15 year-old white female Siamese called Cleo. Perhaps someone other than a cat-lover could tell me the benefit of this information?

2 Responses to Mapping Moggies

Whilst we do map absolutely everything, my only concern with this piece of geo (as a cat owner) is that if people have pedigree’s, you are actually telling everyone where your overly expensive feline is (should you wnat to steal it). This happens often with pedigree dogs.
As for your parting comment, as a fellow #geo bod, I fail to see the objective of this mapping piece. An outcome of a high denisty of felines in urban centres is not going to come as news to anybody.
It would be useful to map big cat sightings, as you may well narrow down areas where a specific big cat maybe.